The UNESCO Courier 2009

The 2009 Archives of the UNESCO Courier provides links to all the monthly issues of UNESCO's principle online magazine as well as to three special issues.

Focus on UNESCO’s Management of Social Transformations Programme (MOST)

This is a 20-minute film that describes the UNESCO’s Management of Social Transformations (MOST) Program. The program is the flagship for UNESCO's Social and Human Sciences program, focusing on the use of social science results by governments, civil society and academia to improve social and economic development processes and decisions.

The video is primarily in French, but includes sections in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The non-English portions have English subtitles.

My computer played the video using the Windows Media Player.

Click here to watch the video!

U.S. UNESCO category 2 centre on freshwater

On Thursday 29 October 2009, the outgoing Director-General of UNESCO, Mr Koïchiro Matsuura, signed with Major General Don T. Riley, Deputy Commanding General of the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), an agreement establishing the UNESCO International Centre for Integrated Water Resources Management (ICIWaRM) in Alexandria, Virginia.

Read more!

Atlas of Transboundary Aquifers

The worldwide Internationally Shared Aquifer Resources Management (ISARM) Initiative is an UNESCO and IAH led multi-agency effort aimed at improving the understanding of scientific, socio-economic, legal, institutional and environmental issues related to the management of transboundary aquifers. Since its start in 2000, ISARM has launched a number of global and regional initiatives. More than 200 transboundary aquifers have been identified. Inventories undertaken in the Americas, Asia, Africa, South-Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Caucasus, and Middle East have been already published separately. This Atlas presents a compilation of available data.

Go to the Atlas website!

In recent years water security for people and the natural environment have taken a centre stage in much of the dialogue on international policy. Coordination among countries is essential for the sustainable management of transboundary aquifers. This atlas is intended to be a valuable reference that will encourage the sound and sustainable management of transboundary aquifers.

UNESCO publishes WSIS Followup brochure

The brochure, entitled Fostering Information and Communication for Development, is a short introduction to the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and its follow-up. It presents different aspects and outcomes of WSIS. Read more!

Pensez-vous que le monde globalisé menace les cultures nationales ? ... Forum d'Avignon 2009 Irina Bokova.

UNESCO Institute for Statistics Report on Research and Development

The number of researchers in developing countries jumped from 1.8 million to 2.7 million in five years (2002-2007), according to the new data release from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS).

The rise in numbers of researchers equates to a 45% increase, from 344 to 499 researchers per million inhabitants in developing countries. During the same period, the number of researchers in developed countries increased by only 8.6% to 4.4 million. In relative terms, this amounts to 3,592 researchers per million inhabitants, still far more than in developing countries.

The information was collected through the third UIS survey on statistics of science and technology (S&T), which is conducted every two years. It focuses on human resources devoted to research and development (R&D), as well as expenditure on R&D. Results of the survey reveal global and regional trends in the allocation of R&D resources.

The UNESCO Courier: Memory and History

Image source: UNESCO

From the cruel dictatorships of Latin America and Cambodia, the destruction of the Burgundian kingdom, and the Korean enlightenment, to the splendour and intrigues of the Malagasy Empire, the saga of the Kalahari and the constructive failure of the League of Nations – memory and history wend their way through this issue, revealing the extraordinary wealth of the documented heritage of humanity.

This issue of the UNESCO Courier (2009, Number 9) was produced in partnership with UNESCO’s Memory of the World program.

Go to the issue webpage!

Happy Birthday UNESCO

The Constitution of UNESCO, signed on 16 November 1945. Yesterday Irina Bokova began her term of office as 10th Director General of the Organization. Best wishes to both!

• Mission Statement
• Video and Text Version of Director General Bokova's Statement on Taking Office

UNESCO contributes to the fourth Internet Governance Forum

UNESCO will participate in the fourth Internet Governance Forum, to be held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, from 15 to 18 November 2009, to advocate the principles of freedom or expression and universal access as fundamental elements of the Internet Governance structures.

Read more!

World Science Day for Peace and Development: 10 November

Celebrated each year on 10 November, World Science Day for Peace and Development provides an opportunity to shine the spotlight on the contribution science makes to achieving sustainable development and enhancing the prospects for peace.

UNESCO is recruiting a new senior staff

UNESCO has published the announcements of the competitive recruitment of the following posts:

• ASSISTANT DIRECTOR-GENERAL FOR AFRICA DEPARTMENT
• ASSISTANT DIRECTOR-GENERAL FOR COMMUNICATION
• ASSISTANT DIRECTOR-GENERAL FOR CULTURE
• ASSISTANT DIRECTOR-GENERAL FOR EDUCATION
• ASSISTANT DIRECTOR-GENERAL FOR NATURAL SCIENCES
• ASSISTANT DIRECTOR-GENERAL FOR SOCIAL AND HUMAN SCIENCES
• ASSISTANT DIRECTOR-GENERAL FOR EXTERNAL RELATIONS AND COOPERATION
• ASSISTANT DIRECTOR-GENERAL FOR ADMINISTRATION

Click here to go to the announcements.

UNESCO pays tribute after death of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss

The world has lost one of its greatest thinkers with the death of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) said today, as he paid tribute to the renowned anthropologist.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss was “one of the giants of the 20th century,” said Koïchiro Matsuura, UNESCO Director-General, in a statement issued from the agency’s headquarters in Paris following the announcement of the Frenchman’s death at the age of 100.

Read more....

A World of Science, vol. 7, no. 4

The October-December issue of UNESCO's A World of Science is now out. Click here to download the issue as a PDF file.

SHS views, 26

The October-December issue of the lead social science online magazine of UNESCO has been published. Click here to download the PDF file.

Knowledge and Future: World Science Forum in Budapest

Ten years after the first World Conference on Science (Budapest, 1999), the fourth World Science Forum will take place in Budapest (Hungary) from 5 to 7 November. The meeting, whose theme this year is “Knowledge and Future”, coincides with World Science Day for Peace and Development, celebrated annually on 10 November.

Read more!

A Conference at UNESCO to examine future of fight against doping

The Conference of States Parties to the International Convention against Doping in Sport is taking place at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris from 26 to 28 October. More....

USAID, UNESCP and Intel Foundation Partnership

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), UNESCO and the Intel Foundation have created a joint project to promote digital inclusion in Brazil. The project will provide courses on "Technology and the Community" and "Technology and in Work" in some 180 community education centers.

Read the announcement from UNESCO Brazil (in Portuguese)!

Editorial: UNESCO should do more to promote effective ues of television

Charles Kenny has an excellent article this month titled "Revolution in a Box" in Foreign Policy magazine. He points out that:

By 2007, there was more than one television set for every four people on the planet, and 1.1 billion households had one. Another 150 million-plus households will be tuned in by 2013.

Today television is revolutionizing social behavior in poor countries as it did in the United States and other affluent countries decades ago.

Charles points out further that television can have an important impact in the promotion of peace:

television help solve a problem we've had since before Sumer and Elam battled it out around Basra in 2700 B.C. -- keeping countries from fighting each other? Maybe.

U.S. researchers who study violence on TV battle viciously themselves over whether it translates into more aggressive behavior in real life. But at least from a broader perspective, television might play a role in stemming the global threat of war. It isn't that TV reporting of death and destruction necessarily reduces support for wars already begun -- that's an argument that has raged over conflicts from Vietnam to the Iraq war. It is more that, by fostering a growing global cosmopolitanism, television might make war less attractive to begin with. Indeed, the idea that communications are central to building cross-cultural goodwill is an old one. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels suggested in the 19th century that railways were vital in rapidly cementing the union of the working class: "that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarians, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years," they wrote in The Communist Manifesto. If the Amtraks of the world can have such an impact, surely the Hallmark Channel can do even better.

Charles also draws attention to the negative impact of a narrow selection of television channels available to the public in poor nations, allowing those channels too often to be dominated by factions that seek to promote their narrow interests via biased broadcasting.

UNESCO's Communications and Information Program is the lead in the United Nations System dealing with broadcasting, and UNESCO's mission of promoting peace and international understanding also demands that it attend to television as a powerful medium for good. Yet UNESCO does very little to promote responsible television broadcasting, not to promote the dissemination of television infrastructure or the use of television to provide a broad content linked to the needs and interests of poor people in developing nations.

Unfortunately, the United States withdrew from UNESCO in the 1980's and in so doing sent the organization into a financial crisis of major proportions -- a crisis from which the organization has not fully recovered to this day. UNESCO does not have the resources to adequately take advantage of the opportunities offered by the rapid penetration of television into the poor areas of the world.

The discussion in the past degenerated into futile areas of "The New World Information Order" rather than useful discussions of the role of mass media in fighting corruption, promoting peace, and disseminating knowledge. Perhaps now is the time to try again!

UNESCO DG Irina Bokova at Women's Forum Global Meeting 09